World on Fire

Every summer, hundreds of wildfires burn millions of acres across the United States. The Santa Ana wind drives fire across Southern California, and forest fires fill the skies over the Western U.S. with smoke. NASA has turned its high-tech eyes toward the fires in a new website called "Fire and Smoke," unveiled just last week at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/index.html. The site, with its stunning images of the world on fire, is an interactive combination of images from NASA satellites, aircraft and other research tools. The images are so good, and the fires so widespread, that the Earth begins to look like something out of a high-quality end-of-the-world science fiction movie. You can watch the smoke plumes drift for hundreds of miles from the California fires, or switch to a NASA image of the carbon monoxide being generated by those fires. There are images of fires in Greece, biomass burning in South America, and atmospheric particles from fires in Alaska. There is even a link to a NASA Goddard site that shows all of the past year's fires on a rotating globe.